A Pursuit of Home

by Kristi Ann Hunter

  It also made her extremely loath to hurt anyone’s feelings.

  Once Daphne’s throat stopped spasming with its attempts to move the charred bread, she smiled. “You’re getting much better at this, Martha.”

  The frown on the brunette’s round face indicated she didn’t quite believe the praise.

  One finger—once soft, elegant, and refined but now work-roughened and callused—flicked at the black bits on the bottom of the roll, creating a tidy pile of burnt bread shavings on the table. “You’re only being nice.”

  “No, she’s right.” Jess picked up the uneaten portion of her roll and banged it against the table. “See? It dents.”

  The young girl grinned but still tossed her uneaten bread back onto her plate. She rubbed a hand over her middle, which was just starting to round, revealing the condition that had sent her fleeing into Daphne’s care in the first place. In this out-of-the-way refuge, the new marchioness was helping women in the same position she herself had once been, women whose decisions had made the life they’d been raised for impossible.

  In a few months, Martha would have a choice. She could allow Daphne to place her child with a new family, to be raised on a farm, happy and healthy and normal. At that point, Martha would return to her old life with a bit more wisdom, a handful of new survival skills, and a load of guilt and questions.

  Or she could keep the child, move to Birmingham, and work in the Marquis of Chemsford’s new factory, crafting buttons and other trifles to sell to the people she’d once rubbed shoulders with in London ballrooms.

  Life was going to be difficult either way, but Jess still envied the girl the clear-cut choice.

  Sometimes the fork in the road turned out to be a dead end, and a woman had no choice but to shove her way through the undergrowth and forge her own future. It sounded adventurous and glamorous, but the truth was, it was all too easy to stumble without a path to follow. Tree roots. Animal nests. Cliffs disguised by an abundance of plant growth along the edge. Making a new way was treacherous.

  Going backward was not an option life provided, though.

  “At least the potatoes look right,” the young woman said hopefully, taking her fork and stabbing it into the soft white chunk on her plate.

  Jess had to allow the girl was right. The potatoes looked perfectly cooked. She slid a bite into her mouth.

  And nearly choked. Her fork clattered to the table as she reached for her cup and drank the contents in three large swallows.

  “Don’t eat that,” she said, gasping for breath and pointing at the offending vegetable. Honestly, how had the thing not shriveled up into dry, dusty crumbs?

  Curiosity—and probably a desire to assure the poor girl her potatoes weren’t that bad—had Daphne taking a small nibble of the bite she had already loaded onto her fork. She coughed. “I daresay—” more coughing—“how much—” cough, cough—“salt did you use?”

  “I used the scoop from the flour.” Small white teeth bit into Martha’s bottom lip. “Was that bad?”

  Jess rose and snagged her cup from the table, intent on refilling it from the bucket of freshly pumped water in the main kitchen. Her tongue, thick and dry and still burning, stuck to the roof of her mouth. Maybe she’d just dunk her head in the bucket. “Yes, that was bad.”

  “Jess,” Daphne admonished.

  “Daphne,” Jess replied in exasperation. “She’s not an idiot. All she needs do is have a lick and she’ll know it’s salty enough to attract the local wildlife. I believe some of the stew from the servants’ dinner is still in the kitchen. I’ll bring us some.”

  While Daphne was willing to sacrifice their mouths to Martha’s disastrous attempts at learning to cook, Jess refused to make the rest of the household participate. She cooked the others’ food and served them first, leaving the servants’ dining room clear for Martha’s failures to go unnoticed.

  Jess still wasn’t sure how Daphne had convinced her to provide the women with cooking lessons. Fortunately Jess had been wise enough to insist that Martha’s attempts be limited to times when Lord Chemsford—the marquis, and Daphne’s new husband—was away from the house.

  With any luck, he’d return from London soon, unable to stay away from the wife he loved more than anything, and they could set these culinary trials aside.

  Daphne followed Jess into the kitchen. “Could you possibly be a bit more . . . encouraging?”

  “I’ll soak the bread in my stew,” Jess said as she ladled the remainder from the pot into three bowls. “Show her that what she’s made is edible.”

  Daphne picked up three spoons and fiddled with them. “You’re supposed to be teaching her. Didn’t you notice her get too much salt?”

  No, she hadn’t, because while Jess had somehow been coerced into giving cooking lessons, the reality of doing so had been too much for her. Being in the kitchen at all brought up memories that were painful enough. Being the one doing the teaching had sent her mind so far into the past that Jess wasn’t sure how she’d managed to return to the present.

  She wasn’t going to attempt to explain that to Daphne, though. Daphne didn’t know where Jess had learned to cook, didn’t know that Ismelde’s devotion to Jess’s family had brought about her demise.

  “People learn more from mistakes than instruction,” Jess murmured.

  “We don’t want her to simply learn,” Daphne said. “We want her to feel loved.”

  “You want her to feel loved,” Jess grumbled. “I want her not to burn down my kitchen.”

  The conversation was brought to a blessed halt by the arrival of Sarah, one of the maids Jess actually liked because she’d once been one of the illegitimate children hiding out in the house alongside Jess and Daphne and their friend Kit.

  “I’m not sure he’s going to eat it,” Sarah said, referring to the tray of food she’d recently delivered to the long-term guest working upstairs.

  As tempted as Jess had been to include a helping of Martha’s bread, she’d managed to resist.

  “Why not?” Daphne asked with a frown.

  Sarah shrugged. “He didn’t even look up from the book he was reading to acknowledge I was there.”

  Jess could only hope the book had been her diary.

  The stew was a bit cold, but it was flavorful and filling, and soon it had been eaten and the dishes taken to the scullery for cleaning.

  Jess was setting her kitchen to rights and preparing for the next morning when Mr. Thornbury entered. He was pale, with slashes of red across his cheekbones, and the bright eyes behind his spectacles were round and wide.

  The diary was clutched tightly in his hands.

  “Finished already?” Jess asked.

  “Where did you get this?”

  Jess frowned. They’d been over that. “From my father.”

  Mr. Thornbury pressed his lips into a thin line. His shoulders hunched a bit and his eyes narrowed. “Where did he get it?”

  “From his father.” Technically her father had gotten it from his brother, who’d gotten it from their father, but honestly the distinction was irrelevant, at least to Mr. Thornbury. Still, she had to bite her tongue to resist the urge to explain the path the diary had taken through the generations.

  “Do you know what is in here?”

  “If I did I wouldn’t need you.” Jess planted her hands on her hips. “You know, for a brilliant man you don’t seem very smart.”

  “What’s going on?” Daphne asked as she entered the room from the scullery, the pinkness of her hands indicating she’d washed the dishes herself, instead of getting one of the half-dozen maids she now employed to do it.

  They’d have to have another discussion about that soon, but Jess had bigger concerns at the moment.

  “Nothing,” Jess bit out just as Mr. Thornbury said, “Your cook wants to ensnare me in some wild-goose chase for an artifact that was likely stolen with a book that I have reason to believe was also stolen.”

  Jess narrowed her eyes as she glared
at the man. “Do you even know the meaning of the word discretion?”

  She abandoned her work and rounded the table to snatch the diary from his hands. At least she tried to. The tight grip he had on the book meant all she ended up doing was yanking herself closer to him.

  Close enough to whisper menacingly into his face. Or at least toward his face. He had too many inches on her petite frame for her to get very close.

  “Why don’t we take a walk, Mr. Thornbury? We can discuss the idea that some things in life are private.”

  He blinked at her. “It’s beginning to grow colder, and I’m fairly certain it’s raining. While you and I won’t come to much harm, it wouldn’t be good for the book.”

  Daphne cleared her throat as Martha emerged from the scullery as well. “I’m going to take Martha to the upstairs parlor. Perhaps she has some ideas on what I’m doing wrong with the cushion cover I’m embroidering.”

  “Oh, finally,” Martha said, nearly running toward the door. “Something I’m actually accomplished at.”

  Though it pained her to give the appearance of weakness, Jess let go of the book. She wasn’t giving up, simply employing a strategic, temporary retreat.

  Did he think his ability to physically look down upon her gave him the advantage? She stepped back around the table and set to sharpening her kitchen knives.

  “We’ve perhaps ten minutes before the servants begin returning to see to their evening duties, Mr. Thornbury. I suggest you make your point quickly.”

  “I haven’t fully translated more than a handful of pages, but I flipped through much of the book to get a sense of its contents.”

  Jess bit her tongue to keep from rushing him as he settled onto a stool at her worktable and opened the book. As she’d learned earlier, had in fact known from watching him survey the house’s contents, this man did nothing quickly. Best to let him meander his way to the point on his own.

  “Most of it is about art. I’m even more convinced that the author was intimately acquainted with The Six and Aldric Fournier. Her descriptions of colors and brushstrokes are remarkably detailed and fit the style perfectly.” He flipped through a few pages. “Why, here she describes the mixing of paint, how he would—”

  “No,” Jess broke in, abandoning the idea that she should let him wander his way to the point. “No paint mixing. Ten minutes, remember?”

  He cleared his throat and gently turned a few more pages in the book. “Hmmm. Well, here, the book changes. The flowing sentences, almost an art within themselves, are dropped in favor of partial sentences and abrupt descriptions. If the writing weren’t in the same hand, I’d think it a different person entirely.”

  One long finger crossed the page, the clean, trimmed fingernail hovering over the surface. “This woman saw horror. And tragedy.” There was a catch to his voice.

  Jess slid the knife she’d been sharpening back into the block of wood. Was he going to cry?

  Mr. Thornbury took in a shaky breath. “I can’t read it all. Some of it is smudged—with tears, I presume. Other parts are written in such a hasty scrawl it would take a great deal of time to study the context and make out the words, but it is very obvious that the hope she’d had when beginning this journal has been removed.” The finger stopped. “It says that nature managed to destroy what men had not been able to.”

  He looked up, those hazel eyes dry despite the emotion he was so evidently feeling. “This was written by a broken woman.”

  A suspicious and unfamiliar tightening grabbed Jess by the throat. Was she going to cry? She never cried. Tears were useless and only delayed a person in coming up with a plan to solve the issue. She swallowed to remove the sudden discomfort. “What does she write after that?”

  “More art.”

  Jess was startled into blankness of thought and action for a moment, but then a small smile curved her lips. Feel the pain and then get on with it, did she? A sense of kinship Jess had never quite managed to achieve with her other family members bloomed in her chest.

  Mr. Thornbury wasn’t finished, though. “Some of the art descriptions are different—more poetic, if you will.” He cleared his throat. “The more I look at this, the more I believe you’re right. There’s something hidden, and you need this book to find it.”

  Excitement, the kind that had once preceded an assignment or tricky escape, made Jess’s fingers itch. “How long will it take you to translate the book?”

  “I’m afraid it’s not that simple.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Derek closed the book and ran a hand over the emblem on the front. “This book is really more of a directory of clues. It may be only half of the information.”

  Jess’s brows puckered as the desire to hit something or run somewhere or maybe just scream at the top her lungs pushed her the step and a half forward until she was pressed to the worktable across from Mr. Thornbury. Despite the churn of energy running through her, perhaps even because of it, Jess forced her tone to remain slow, even, and perhaps even cordial. “Where is the other half, then?”

  He swallowed hard, his throat jumping and that ridiculous swath of hair that hung over his forehead trembling. “I think it’s in the paintings.”

  “In the paintings?” Jess’s knees threatened to give way, and she locked them in place to stay upright.

  She hated paintings. Well, didn’t hate them so much as saw very little point in one over another. If asked before this moment, she’d have said she was ambivalent.

  After this moment, she was changing her feelings toward paintings to extreme dislike. If she couldn’t think of a plan that didn’t involve continued communication with Mr. Thornbury, she would upgrade that to hate.

  “In a way. I think one helps to decode the other.”

  Jess frowned, a suspicious sense of unease crawling through her middle. “How?”

  The slash of red on his cheeks had begun to fade, but now it came rushing back. “I . . . I’m not sure. I’d have to see one of the paintings first.”

  That was what she’d been afraid of.

  Chapter Five

  The old woman across from him wasn’t knitting.

  It had taken him half the trip to London to realize it, but the tiny woman wasn’t actually knitting. It was a very good facsimile. The rhythmic click of the needles and the steady looping of yarn would have fooled almost anyone into thinking the bag tucked neatly in the woman’s lap was being steadily filled with some sort of shawl or scarf similar to the one wrapped over her head and shoulders.

  Only two things marred her ruse.

  One, she’d snagged the yarn a bit about half a mile back, nearly sending one of her knitting needles to the floor. The flawed section of yarn had just passed through her fingers for the third time.

  Two, Derek knew how to knit. Once he’d given the woman his attention instead of trying to understand the strange scene he’d left behind in Wiltshire, it was soon obvious that she was only going through the motions. Literally.

  Derek turned the page on his book, using the excuse of the tightly packed mail coach to pull his arms closer in to his sides and lift the book just a bit higher so he could peer over the top of it at the old woman.

  When she’d boarded the coach at the last moment, she’d been nothing more than another faceless passenger headed for London. Derek’s mind certainly hadn’t been on picking apart his travel companions.

  He’d been too busy trying to understand why, when Jess had been in such an all-fired rush earlier in the day, yesterday evening she’d calmly suggested he travel to London to seek out one of the paintings and find the connection.

  Alone.

  With a scowl and a shrug, she’d said, “I do believe one of us might not arrive if we attempted to travel together, Mr. Thornbury. Go to London. Write me what you find.”

  Go to London? Write her? When he’d informed her that he couldn’t simply up and leave, she’d raised one of those perfect, delicate eyebrows at Lady Chemsford, who had immediately a
greed that his cataloguing of the house could wait.

  He’d nearly refused on principle, but the combined scrutiny of the women in the house convinced him that leaving was in his best interest. He would go to William, Lord Chemsford, who was currently in London. Perhaps the man would have some insight into why Jess was acting the way she was. He could at least explain his wife’s part in the circumstances.

  Even if Derek did manage to find one of the paintings and match it up to the diary, what would he do with it? There were numerous paintings described in the diary. Would one painting tell him anything?

  No, the more he thought about it, the entire exchange made no sense. He’d been over and over the entire conversation, and all he’d gotten was a sore head.

  Perhaps the non-knitting woman was a puzzle he could actually unravel. Learning the secrets of one woman might give him the confidence and insight to solve those of another.

  At first glance, she was an older woman. At second glance as well. He narrowed his gaze. The assumption even held on closer inspection.

  Her shoulders were rounded and lumpy. Her short, stocky body was covered in several thick layers, despite the warmth of the full carriage. The knitting needles moved continuously, a slight tremor making them click more.

  In rare moments of silence when the road was especially smooth and their coach companions especially quiet, the slight rattle of her breath joined the clack of needles.

  Hidden treasure, coded diaries, and Jess herself had obviously addled his mind. Why else would he be trying to turn this little old woman into something else? Admittedly, the false knitting was strange, but it was keeping her occupied, so why did he care?

  He turned back to his book, but still something about the old woman nagged at him. His gaze wandered her direction just in time to see the snagged yarn slip through her fingers again.

  Something was definitely wrong.

  This woman obviously wasn’t a painting—the movement and rattled breathing clearly indicated that she was among the living—but perhaps he could examine her as if she were.